User blog

The Aftermath of Portland

Expanding on Expanded

What’s up 60 Cards readers? I know that many of you attended Portland and if you didn’t attend the event, you likely watched the livestream from home. The Expanded format remained hidden in the shadows since Roanoke which ultimately lead to the metagame that we saw in Portland. While Lost Thunder will be released before our next Expanded Regional Championships in Anaheim, this article should serve as a guide leading into that. Most of the time, Expanded is a direct result of the last tournament we had with counter decks, the top decks, and perhaps even some emerging concepts. Portland didn’t disappoint, they decks were inventive, and you might learn a thing or two from reading this FREE article.

This is part of a new ongoing series of articles for 60 Cards that will be going over the weekly changes in the metagame. While the authorship of this article will remain unknown, it is being written by a professional player who is remaining anonymous for now, meaning that you are in good hands. The goal of this series is to showcase the strength of available content on 60 Cards as we enter a new era of professionalism and content creation. The best part, this series will be absolutely FREE which means that you will always have quality information available to you on a weekly basis. These articles will range in including deck lists, strategies, promo card releases, and other important information as it comes along. That being said, 60 Cards is hoping to win you over with our new strategic plan going forward so feel free to give feedback to help us improve. Let’s look at some of the top performing decks from Portland.

Table of contents

Looking at the Decks From Portland

Portland was a tournament filled with fun times, fierce competitors, and some prehistoric tech cards. There were players using
Archen (PLB; 53)
,
Tirtouga (PLB; 27)
, and
Lileep (PLB; 3)
in their
Zoroark GX (SLG; 53)
decks to prevent them from being decked out. While those techs may have appeared in small increments at previous Regionals, they were played on a much bigger scale in Portland.

In this section do the article, each top deck will be looked over so that you can understand its strategy and see what the best lists look like. All of this information should be used by you to help pick a deck for this upcoming League Cups / League Challenges and Anaheim Regionals. Each deck will be linked so that you can easily find specific information whenever you like.

The strategy of this deck is to draw through your deck with
Zoroark GX (SLG; 53)
by using Trade, locking your opponent with
Seismitoad EX (FRF; 20)
by using Quaking Punch, and using disruption Supporters. Once you run out of cards in your deck, you can use
Tirtouga (PLB; 27)
to loop through your deck to avoid decking out, use
Lusamine (CIN; 96)
to get back important Supporters, and proceed to disrupt your opponent. The deck is obviously a compelling concept by having a high amount of success so lets peep this list out.

Energy (4)

All of these cards serve the same purpose, don’t attack, and it is merely personal preference for which one that you choose. If I had a choice, I would likely choose
Tirtouga (PLB; 27)
because I like the color blue. Which one would you pick?

Energy (10)

Everest decided to include a copy of
Kingdra GX (DM; 18)
as an alternative target to
Blastoise (BC; 31)
for the opportunity to have a strong attacker with plenty of HP. This move seemed risky heading into Portland, but it obviously paid off with his strong performance.

Primal Groudon-EX

Joe Sanchez brought a wild deck to Portland Regionals,
Primal Groudon EX (PRC; 86)
, to a Top Four finish after losing to Pendarvis. The reason why this deck is wild is because it includes four copies of the most expensive playable card,
Tropical Beach 11 (BW; 28)
, which means that this deck is off-putting due to its hefty price tag.

Energy (5)

The inclusion of
Articuno GX (CLS; 31)
is quite sneaky because you can use Cold Crush GX to remove all of your opponents Energy attached to their Active Pokemon in a pinch.

Looking at Sanchez’s
Primal Groudon EX (PRC; 86)
deck, he was likely happy to avoid
Articuno GX (CLS; 31)
within the top cut of Portland. There were a few other tricky cards in the list above, such as
Weakness Policy (BUS; 126)
, that would allow Williams to play to whatever situation he was in. One of the trends of these top decks from Portland was that each deck seemed to be tailored to each individual player to play better in certain situations.

With all of these cards to deal with a plethora of decks, it is not surprising to see him place near the top of the tournament. As we have observed above, the key to winning in Expanded is to have many different cards to deal with many different scenarios.

What Does This All Mean?

It’s pretty simple,
Zoroark GX (SLG; 53)
decks had another dominating weekend and the only thing to stop them heading forward seems to be fighting type decks. It is difficult to predict if some early Lost Thunder frontrunners, such as
Blacephalon GX (SM8) (JP; null)
or
Alolan Ninetales GX (JP; 132)
, will be played, but that is what testing is for. We can only go off of the results from above and it seems like a solid starting point to start testing the above decks heading into Anaheim.

Heading Forward

Well, that concludes this week’s Metagame Analysis! I hope that you have enjoyed this journey and that you look forward to next weeks FREE article.

Next week, we will be looking over some of the available Lost Thunder decks for your viewing pleasure. It is our hopes that with the content becoming better each week, that you will decide to support our site with a subscription.